But for it to be intuitive and fun, awesomeness and practicality in stunts like that must meet! Having something awesome which is of no practical use will result in people ignoring it after the first time, and if it's only practical without being awesome, people won't enjoy it as much as they could!
Consider Assassin's Creed, a game whose developers had a clear goal of putting in awesome stuff with quantities of awesomeness increasing with each installment. Most of the awesome stuff is also practical - you have cool double assassinations, fancy counter kills, execution streaks, disarms...
In the latest "big" installment, Brotherhood, you finally get something that's not that awesome, but is practical. The poison darts. No one will notice you poison guards with them, so they're basically a very-low risk way of killing people or causing a distraction (the poison causes the target to go berserk before dying). Not really awesome, but definitely practical.
Another example, from the GTA series. San Andreas included one of the largest 3D video game maps as of then. To meet the requirements of a larger map, the game provided something awesome for the player: a wide variety of aircraft, including the Hydra jet fighter. Flying the Hydra in San Andreas was extremely awesome the first time I played it, and it turned out to be extremely practical as well, which further overflooded me with joy. On the other hand, GTA has a long history of practical-yet-counterawesome stuff like safehouses offering arbitrarily large amounts of ammo to the players who saved, picked up the ammo and saved again.